Some people think that psychiatrists are among the most
neurotic people around, and why not? A completely stable
person may simply not become interested in the field any more
than would a guy with 20/20 vision would choose to become an
optometrist. (Yes, I realize there are some.) Nonetheless, if you
know Michael Douglas, who played Mr. Calm in Oliver Stone's
1987 film "Wall Street," you can expect him in his current role as
a psychiatrist to be stable, loving, smart. But in "Don't Say a
Word," he is more like the unflappable fellow in David Fincher's
"The Game" who is shaken to his roots while playing a deadly bit
of recreation planned by his well-meaning brother. Unfortunately,
"Don't Say a Word" shares more with Fincher's film than with
Stone's in that Gary Fleder's excursion into the psyches of the
traumatized and of the criminal has no sense of humor. Even
worse, it takes no chances, mines no new territory, but instead
plays that old war horse, the race against time. Movies like this
one deadl with kidnappers want something from their prey and
give the innocents x number of hours or days to come up with a)
money, b) information, c) whatever else is needed. In a failed
attempt to offer complexity, Fleder juggles several balls
throughout the film as it plods on to its predictable conclusion, but
this succeeds only in making the slick story more convoluted
than it needs to be.

The 56-year-old Douglas is paired with the 36-year-old Dutch-
born Famke Janssen, a woman whose youth belies her lack of
appeal as an actress. Douglas is Dr. Nathan Conrad, seen from
the beginning completing a session with a youthful patient, the
kind of shrink we wish we all had--understanding and down-to-
earth. He is Aggie Conrad's loving husband and the caring father
of eight-year-old Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiak). He is about to
fall apart emotionally when he finds his daughter missing on the
very morning that he is take her to a street party near his Upper
West Side New York neighborhood. Receiving a call from
Patrick Koster (Sean Bean), he and his wife are warned--as
kidnappers are wont to do--to avoid calling the police. Koster
and his small group of co-conspirators are full professional: they
have bugged the Conrad residence and can watch every move
made by his currently bedridden wife, stuck at home with her leg
in a cast and in traction.

Fleder begins the film in a promising, if formulaic way,
choreographing a bank robbery in the Williamsburg section of
Brooklyn, one in which the criminals toss aside sums of money,
seeking only a gem said to be worth ten million dollars. (Who
would pay them such a sum is something we can only guess.)
When the gang is double-crossed by the father of Elisabeth
Burrows (Brittany Murphy as a teen), Elisabeth is traumatized,
held over in Bellevue Hospital, bearing a secret that the
gangsters are asking: she will not say a word, at least not to
ordinary psychiatrists like Dr. Sachs (Oliver Platt), and certainly
not to detective Sandra Cassidy (Jennifer Esposito)--which is
why the bad guys are after the only head doctor who might pry
the confidential information from the pale, unsmiling patient.
These are smart criminals indeed. But in a commercial movie
such as this one, they're never smart enough.

After the terrible incident of September 11, some say that
"Arnold" movies may be on borrowed time...that the public may
no longer be willing to accept mindless fodder involving exploding
buildings and edifice-climbing heroes who would be the envy of
"Crouching Tiger"'s Michelle Yeoh. Director Fleder's film may not
be an Arnold movie (he has done better than this with the stylized
"Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead)." But is there a
chance of extending this moratorium on blockbusters to
unimaginative race-against-time pics such as "Don't Say a
Word"?